Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Well in Oakland, those redlined areas have exactly the same housing stock as the non redlined areas. Unless they only mangaged to tear down the crappy old homes and left the good ones. I doubt it as Oakland has tons of pre-1940s all around most of the city. West Oakland is packed with Victorian homes just like the similar looking neighborhood in Alameda that were not redlined. Berkeley has the same. Some Victorian areas were redlined, some weren't.
Could be. I don't know why it was made so personal, e.g. "your neighborhood". This doesn't apply to any home I have owned; they were both built well after 1968. I wouldn't be surprised if my old 'hood in Denver had been redlined, or at least yellow-lined. But we were just renting there.
Last edited by Katarina Witt; 05-25-2014 at 04:10 PM..
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,576 posts, read 81,167,557 times
Reputation: 57808
While it's hard to get away with redlining now, there is still plenty of opportunity to discriminate on the sale of homes, especially now that there are multiple offers over asking price in some areas like ours. I remember our second house, in the SF Bay Area, we bid against one other couple. There was no racial issue, but the sellers chose us though our offer was slightly less, because the other couple was not married. `Where we live now, east of Seattle, builders are actually designing homes with two master bedrooms, because there are so many cash buyers coming from India and China that bring their parents with them.
Noxious industry predates the industrial revolution and urban ghettoes.
Factories sprang up where land was cheap. Factory workers had to live within walking distance of where they worked.
It's really that simple.
My point remains. Pollution and its effects increased AFTER the industrial revolution, and factories were built near neighborhoods the government had already redlined.
Are you telling me after the urban ghettos were built, factories stopped being built?
And no, this thread is not about white guilt. It is about racist housing policies that made up many (not all) neighborhoods today. Not talking about won't fix it.
Well in Oakland, those redlined areas have exactly the same housing stock as the non redlined areas. Unless they only mangaged to tear down the crappy old homes and left the good ones. I doubt it as Oakland has tons of pre-1940s all around most of the city. West Oakland is packed with Victorian homes just like the similar looking neighborhood in Alameda that were not redlined. Berkeley has the same. Some Victorian areas were redlined, some weren't.
I don't think housing stock is really a good predictor of neighborhood quality or the direction it's going. Central Stockton, where I grew up but not in the central part, has a lot of great housing stock. It's also a really terrible neighborhood. Most of it actually wasn't redlined. A lot has happened since 1930 though. For example, Stockton pretty much stopped at Alpine then. The stretch that was considered "good" was from Harding to Alpine. That's a pretty terrible area nowadays while the good side of Stockton is mostly all north of March.
Black was never really much of a consideration here. The Harding to Alpine neighborhood is now Hispanic. It never was black and never was redlined. It's still a crappy area. Housing there is mostly modest, but again, that's not a great predictor. Central Stockton has some great housing stock and is even worse, aside from a few pockets. None of that area was ever redlined. Mostly what was redlined was south Stockton, which at the time was around Charter Way. That's now a REALLY crappy area, just like it was in 1930, which is why it was redlined in the first place.
But a lot happens. Some areas that were really crappy areas and redlined in the '30s are now not really crappy areas. They have been gentrified. Other areas that were not crappy areas and never were redlined have become crappy areas. Redlining is more a reflection on the demand of a neighborhood at the time.
The government was bailing out delinquent homeowners. Redlining was designed to bailout homeowners in neighborhoods where the house could be seized and still be worth something if they defaulted on the bailout loans which had greatly reduced monthly payments since the term of the loan was much longer than conventional private mortgages at the time. That had some unintended consequences for sure, they were even pretty obvious consequences.
My point remains. Pollution and its effects increased AFTER the industrial revolution, and factories were built near neighborhoods the government had already redlined.
Are you telling me after the urban ghettos were built, factories stopped being built?
And no, this thread is not about white guilt. It is about racist housing policies that made up many (not all) neighborhoods today. Not talking about won't fix it.
To build a factory, a company needs a certain number of acres. The companies go where the open land is. I don't think many factories were sited in ghettos after the ghettos were all built up, no.
My point remains. Pollution and its effects increased AFTER the industrial revolution, and factories were built near neighborhoods the government had already redlined.
Are you telling me after the urban ghettos were built, factories stopped being built?
And no, this thread is not about white guilt. It is about racist housing policies that made up many (not all) neighborhoods today. Not talking about won't fix it.
The US didn't have any "big cities" before the industrial revolution.
Poor people from rural areas moved to cities in search of work after factories were built.
This is a global phenomenon - and particularly pronounced in places like the UK, France, Germany, China, Japan, etc . . . places that were ethnically homogenous 100 years ago.
Well in Oakland, those redlined areas have exactly the same housing stock as the non redlined areas. Unless they only mangaged to tear down the crappy old homes and left the good ones. I doubt it as Oakland has tons of pre-1940s all around most of the city. West Oakland is packed with Victorian homes just like the similar looking neighborhood in Alameda that were not redlined. Berkeley has the same. Some Victorian areas were redlined, some weren't.
A lot of the neighborhoods with the worst housing stock were torn down in the 50s and 60s to make way for freeways, parking lots, industrial zones, public housing, parks, etc. Cities could do it easily because it was the cheapest land.
I'm sure if you find some old ortho photos of Oakland you'll find that quite a few of those old neighborhoods are completely gone. There wasn't a lot of time between the end of "urban renewal" and the civil rights era/the official end of redlining.
I think what you're also seeing is the slow decline of the once wealthy areas since the 1930s and especially since the 50s. When all of the houses have a patina it's more difficult to judge what the differences would've been 60 years ago.
The process didn't have to happen (urban renewal). Philly had great success in stabilizing and rebuilding Society Hill (houses with no running water or missing major bathroom fixtures ran 20-30%) . . . but at the same time they knocked down the adjacent waterfront areas (oldest houses in the city) for I-95 and knocked down half of Old City for Independence National Park.
The redlining was self-fulfilling. It pointed out neighborhoods suffering from disinvestment then made sure that those neighborhoods would continue to suffer. It doesn't mean that there was no access to credit and of course a lot of people made improvements without borrowing any money at all.
It's important to note that FHA loans are just for first-time borrowers and when those loans were made accessible to AAs to buy wherever they wanted to (in the early 70s) is the very beginning of the black migration to the suburbs. The VA loans (0% down in the 1950s with loans 1% below prime) were a much more powerful vehicle in moving white people to the suburbs.
It wasn't until the Clinton administration (being generally pro-urban) put requirements on banks regarding lending in urban areas that we started to see a real change in investment there and it was only 4 years ago that the Obama admin changed the rules on lending for mixed-use buildings. It used to be really difficult for developers to get lending to build mixed-use projects or even to convert old office buildings to apartments or condos.
While it's hard to get away with redlining now, there is still plenty of opportunity to discriminate on the sale of homes, especially now that there are multiple offers over asking price in some areas like ours. I remember our second house, in the SF Bay Area, we bid against one other couple. There was no racial issue, but the sellers chose us though our offer was slightly less, because the other couple was not married. `Where we live now, east of Seattle, builders are actually designing homes with two master bedrooms, because there are so many cash buyers coming from India and China that bring their parents with them.
The rules vary slightly from state-to-state but not that much. If a buyer presents an offer and you ask about their ethnicity or religion your agent can't answer (and likely doesn't know in the first place) and can drop you as a client.
Once you list your house publicly you're bound by all the same rules.
But banks still redline - they just don't use race as a factor anymore. I took out a home equity loan years ago to buy and fix up an abandoned house on my block. The bank that holds the HELOC is different from the bank that holds the mortgage. I refinanced my mortgage 2 years ago to get a lower rate but the bank that holds the HELOC had to sign off on it and they kept telling Wells Fargo (the bank holding the mortgage) that they were appraising my house for too much.
The HELOC bank sent over a list of recent sales - houses all smaller than mine that hold sold in the $30k-$50k range. They were all shells or at the very least had been abandoned/unoccupied for at least 20 years and none of them were particularly close to my house (not by urban standards anyway).
So I fired back with a list of comps of recent sales of new construction houses about the same size as mine that were all 50-80% higher than what Wells Fargo wanted to appraise my house for. I also told them that they were treading on thin ice with their comps. If they were going to pull comps from a half mile west of my house (a poorer neighborhood) then they also had to look at comps from 1/4 mile east (a wealthier neighborhood)
They eventually approved the refi but that's only because I had been working in the industry for 6 years at that point and wouldn't let them get away with what they were trying to pull. After agreeing to approve the refi the bank manager told me over the phone "this is exactly why we don't do loans in the city anymore."
The subtext was that "we're a suburban bank, the city market is too confusing for us, we don't know how to accurately judge risk, we're trying to close out all of our outstanding loans there and you're one of the last holdouts."
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
